Pearson / MHCI Capstone

User-Centered Research

Our research process had both domain research and field research tracks that ran concurrently.

In our domain research, we completed 2 rounds of literature review, in which we explored both the education field in general and topics more specific to our client’s needs, and 2 rounds of competitive analysis, in which we examined features and practices of competitive companies and companies in analogous domains.

In our field research, we visited 11 universities and conducted contextual interviews on potential users for our final design to gain an intimate understanding of their work processes. We held group “interpretation sessions” in which we generated models of communication flows, culture and environmental factors, and work sequences to gain a shared understanding of the systems our users use and the efficiency with which they use them. We took the notes generated in these interpretation sessions to generate an affinity diagram. The affinity diagram helped us to uncover general patterns and overall themes of user attitudes and behaviors to inform our design process.

Iterative Design and Development

Our final design went through 6 iterations before we showed our final product to our client. Our iterations consisted of brainstorming and designing the features we wanted to test to see how well the met user needs, actually building a prototype for testing, and then finally completing a round of user testing on the prototype we built with no fewer than 5 users per round. We built prototypes at 3 levels of fidelity: low-fidelity paper prototypes, mid-fidelity, interactive prototypes built in Axure RP, and a final, high-fidelity working prototype built in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.